Reviews of “The Good Soldiers”

“Finkel, a Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter at The Washington Post, describes the war on the ground, day by day, for members of an Army battalion sent to Baghdad during the surge in 2007. With a novelistic sense of narrative and character, Finkel shows the fallout that the decision to invade Iraq and the war's "ruinous beginnings" would have on a group of individual soldiers (average age 19), who by various twists of fate, found themselves stationed in a hot spot on the edge of Baghdad.”

“He writes from inside the hearts and minds of these nineteen year old kids who are in an infantry division in Iraq. He writes about IEDs (improvised explosive devices) buried in heaps of trash or sewn into the corpses of dead dogs, or lying around in the running sewers and the constant stress of life there. He writes about the town so you can see and smell it as hell. I can only read a few pages at a time.”

“It’s a lesson on framing, the way the big picture is most starkly displayed by the telling detail, in Finkel’s superb and terrifying account of an Army battalion’s 15-month stint in an especially ugly corner of Baghdad, it’s the taste of blood. And not your own.”

“…this is a book that captures the surreal horror of war: the experience of blood and violence and occasional moments of humanity that soldiers witness first-hand, and the slide shows of terrible pictures that will continue to play through their heads long after they have left the battlefield.”

“This is a book that captures the surreal horror of war: the experience of blood and violence and occasional moments of humanity that soldiers witness first-hand, and the slide shows of terrible pictures that will continue to play through their heads long after they have left the battlefield.”

"[A] ferociously reported, darkly humorous and spellbinding book. [...] Finkel has made art out of a defining moment in history. You will be able to take this book down from the shelf years from now and say: This is what happened. This is what it felt like."